It’s a familiar storyline for Ontario Liberals. Losing an election, badly. Expecting to do much better in the next, only to fall short and have to start over.
It sounds like last year, when Premier Doug Ford’s Progressive Conservatives won a second term with a bigger majority and the Liberals again failed to win enough seats for official party status in the legislature, placing a distant third.
But this was 1995 and the Liberals — who had been out of power since 1990 and in the shadows of then-premier Mike Harris’s Common Sense Revolution after losing an election they had been forecast to win — would soon embark on a leadership race.
On the fifth ballot in the wee hours of Dec. 1, 1996 at the old Maple Leaf Gardens, they chose Dalton McGuinty, a 41-year-old lawyer and MPP from Ottawa who had the good fortune to inherit the mantle of Official Opposition leader.
He was elected premier in a landslide 20 years ago Monday , launching a dynasty that would span 15 years, create the Greenbelt and full-day kindergarten, lower school class sizes, declare the Family Day holiday and close coal-fired power plants — despite troubles along the way with the gas plants scandal, the health tax, the Great Recession and the Green Energy Act.
Now, at a crossroads for the second time since their 2018 fall from government and picking a new leader Dec. 2 from a field of four candidates, Liberals across the province are looking to catch lightning in a bottle once more.
“I remain very optimistic, I think there’s lots of room for growth for our party. But let’s start by recognizing it’s not 2003,” McGuinty, who served as premier until his 2013 departure amid a furor over the cancellation of two gas plants, told the Star in a rare interview.
“The world has changed — a lot. It’s definitely more complex. It’s more polarized. It’s more intimidating. The future is less inviting and more people are struggling to get ahead and stay ahead.”
Veterans of that heady time two decades ago uniformly offer this assessment: victory won’t come unless the party is prepared with a platform of substantial policies that speak to the moment and resonate with the public, and a leader who can sell them while sounding genuine in the process.
“It may be true that governments defeat themselves and certainly they run out of lustre over time,” former Liberal deputy premier and cabinet minister George Smitherman said with a nod to Ford’s plunge in the polls over the $8.28-billion Greenbelt land swap scandal.
“But there’s a lot to be said for an opposition party presenting itself as ready. That was a big, big piece of it in 2003.”
Former McGuinty speech writer and executive director of communications Matt Maychak recalls the years in Official Opposition with a relative army of MPPs and a staff that included Gerald Butts and Katie Telford, who both went on to help Justin Trudeau become prime minister.
That compares with the nine Liberal MPPs currently seated in the Ontario Legislature — three short of the 12 members needed for official party status and extra funding for staff and research that comes with it.
“It’s even tougher for the Ontario Liberals now. That’s not to say it’s impossible. Things do turn around and things do change, but the notion you can change the face at the top, grab a few headlines … that’s just not how it works,” said Maychak, a former Queen’s Park reporter for the Star and CBC.
“You’ve got to build up a policy structure, you have to build a team, you have to recruit candidates … you have to build fundraising capacity. All of those things are a lot more work than it looks from the outside.”
Butts said the rebuilding involved a deep foundation of policy — and substance over style.
“Dalton had the conviction that they lost in ’99 because he was just the anti-(Mike) Harris candidate,” said the Liberal policy guru, who joined McGuinty’s opposition office in 2000.
“He spent probably 80 per cent of his time on policy,” said Butts, recalling how the Liberals travelled to the United States, the United Kingdom and Ireland to see how centrist progressive parties had fared in the “idea marketplace.”
“What are the handful of ideas that you’re going to get excited about, because that excitement is positive and contagious,” said Butts.
Butts pointed to capping school class sizes, creating the Greenbelt and phasing out coal-fired power generation as “durable” policy achievements of the time.
“It sounds cliched, but it really was mostly about ideas,” he said.
Thinking back, McGuinty admits to not being prepared for his first election as leader in 1999, writing in his autobiography that the party’s platform was “thin on specifics … cobbled together in haste and without a lot of research or critical thought on my part.”
There were promises of higher spending on health care and education but lower taxes for the middle class and a balanced budget.
“We were trying to be all things to all people. Many Ontarians had had enough of the (Progressive) Conservatives’ hard-right agenda, but our plan failed to inspire them,” McGuinty added in the 2015 book, Making A Difference. “And in hindsight, it didn’t do much to inspire me.”
The party’s ill-fated 2022 platform also failed to catch on, with its main promises criticized as gimmicky, including “buck-a-ride, provincewide” transit fares, an optional Grade 13 and no provincial sales tax on take-home and restaurant meals under $20.
An internal and candid review of the Liberals’ “devastating and disappointing” defeat in 2022 also cited poor voter-identification data, inadequate vetting of candidates — three were fired early in the campaign, including one for writing a book claiming, without evidence, that homosexuality is caused by infants “rebreathing” their own air — and a lack of volunteers and money.
McGuinty says he learned by 2003, when the party published seven booklets detailing a suite of promises, that campaign pledges had to come from his “core” beliefs, such as preserving prime farmland with the Greenbelt.
“You need to figure out what you are prepared to go to the wall for. What inspires you? What moves you personally?” added the first Ontario Liberal leader to win back-to-back majority governments in 70 years.
“If you lose sight of your own North Star, you’re easily blown off course, and then you’ll be grasping for a policy here, a plank there. People are looking for coherence. They want to know you have a strong, values-based centre from which you are leading.”
McGuinty took full advantage of his long apprenticeship period as Official Opposition leader from 1996 to 2003, overcoming “bellyaching and hand wringing” over the 1999 loss, says his former director and executive assistant Tracey Sobers.
“They were determined to learn from the 1999 election,” she said. “He came from nowhere, he paid his dues, worked hard and learned his lessons.”
After five tough years since their hard 2018 fall from power, Liberals now feel they are heading into the leadership contest with wind in their sails.
In July 27 byelections, the party held Scarborough-Guildwood and won in the longtime Progressive Conservative stronghold of Kanata-Carleton despite determined on-the-ground campaigning by Ford in both ridings and strong performances by the Official Opposition New Democrats under Marit Stiles.
“They were huge,” said former Liberal cabinet minister Deb Matthews, who served under McGuinty and premier Kathleen Wynne. “They send a message that we’re alive and well and a real alternative.”
In a flex, the new Liberal MPPs Andrea Hazell and Karen McCrimmon made a point of shaking Ford’s hand as they were led to their seats in the legislature last Monday as members returned for the fall session and the premier faced tough questions about the Greenbelt land swap, despite his decision to scrap it as “a mistake.”
The Liberal leadership candidates have been criss-crossing the province for months and will participate in several debates before ballots are cast.
They are Bonnie Crombie, mayor of Mississauga since 2014, Liberal MPs Yasir Naqvi (Ottawa Centre) and Nate Erskine-Smith (Beaches-East York), and Liberal MPP Ted Hsu (Kingston and the Islands). Liberal MPP Adil Shamji (Don Valley East) withdrew from the race Thursday to throw his support behind Crombie, the apparent front-runner.
More than 80,000 Liberal party members will vote on the last weekend in November, using a one-member, one-vote system weighted evenly throughout the province’s 124 ridings and with ranked ballots that list their choices from first to fifth.
The winner will be announced a week later at the Metro Toronto Convention Centre, exactly 27 years and one day after McGuinty took the party’s helm.
As for the Liberal storyline, the next chapter is yet to be written.
“The leader of this pack of nine MPPs has a lower expectation,” said Smitherman, noting that ridings like his old one of Toronto Centre that have gone New Democrat with MPP Kristyn Wong-Tam will be harder to flip back to Liberal than if they have gone Progressive Conservative.
“I think it’s very challenging to imagine that you’re going to form a government in one go … which of course is the motivation for a lot of Liberals.”
With files from Robert Benzie
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